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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
RSS delivers a long-promised Internet dream -- getting you the information you want from the people you want without hassle or bother.
Dec 4, 2003 | What if someone had sat you down in 1994 and told you, "There's this new thing called HTML, and it's going to change how we get much of our news and information"? (Maybe you were lucky enough that someone actually did this for you. It happened to me -- though it took more than one introduction for the message finally to get through.)
You would probably have thought, "'HTML'? Sheesh, couldn't they come up with a better name?"
But of course, they had: The name was the World Wide Web, a term that instantly conveyed a rich metaphor for the global orgy of linking that was about to commence.
RSS, a similarly opaque name for a similarly important technology, is at just such a moment in its history. This much-argued-over but basically elementary technical standard allows you to subscribe to blogs -- or any other source of information.
What's the big deal in that? Bigger than it looks. The simple combination of blogs and RSS presages a whole new model for personal publishing and communication online that's already taking shape.
Think for a moment how many of us have come to use the Web as part of our daily rounds. I've been assiduously keeping a roster of bookmarks for years now. Browsers (even my beloved Opera) have never made this as easy as it could be, but the real problem with bookmarks is that they're dumb -- they can't tell you whether there's anything new on a site.
Bookmarks and blogs seem to be the perfect couple, but they work well together only with those blogs that are feverishly updated around the clock. You don't really need to ask whether Boing Boing or Dave Winer have updated their blogs, because the answer is nearly always yes, and a click on a bookmark to their sites is nearly always rewarded with new stuff.
Where bookmarks break down is with those blogs that are irregularly and infrequently updated. Who wants to keep reloading those Web pages only to find there's nothing new on them? This is where RSS comes in. If you're consuming your blogs not through a browser but through an RSS "aggregator," or reader -- there are dozens out there now, many of them free -- the aggregator will tell you which of the sites you've subscribed to has new material.
That single, simple interface upgrade changes everything. Suddenly, it becomes easy to subscribe to dozens, even hundreds of feeds from pundits, friends, organizations, companies you're interested in. You'd never, ever be able to keep up with so many under the browser/bookmark model.
"Who has time to read hundreds of blogs?" I hear you objecting -- "I can't even keep up with InstaPundit!"
Perhaps the biggest misunderstanding of the blogging phenomenon arises from the sheer volume of postings in the highest-profile blogs. We tend to think of these as the models for all blogs -- but they're not the rule. Most bloggers don't update around the clock. Many of my favorite bloggers post relatively infrequently, once a week or less. Some high-profile ones -- like Lotus Notes creator and Groove founder Ray Ozzie -- allow months to pass between posts.
With RSS, it doesn't matter. The next time Ozzie drops an important posting -- like his presentation of prior art evidence in the Eolas lawsuit against Microsoft -- I'll know.
The beauty of RSS is that it lets you build an ad hoc network of experts and friends whose postings you want to tune in to. Then you don't have to think about it again. Along with blogs, RSS fulfills the Internet visionaries' prediction that we'd all find a set of "human filters" to help us navigate the new information seas.
